Adriana Santamaria P

Organisation: SOLE Colombia

Adriana is a communication designer, visual thinker and entrepreneur that believes in empowering people to take ideas into social actions. By approaching every opportunity as a design challenge she has structured roadmaps that integrate users,

Christos Sotiropoulos

Organisation: Sotiropoulos English Language School

Christos has been teaching English since 1993 in a small village 30 km from Chania in Crete, Greece. He started with 30 students in a private school and now teaches English to about 100 students from K-3 to K-12.

Dashgara Lab

Located in a rural Montessori middle school, Dasghara in West Bengal is about three hours from Kolkata. It is the the School in the Cloud’s smallest purpose-built research lab to date at just 15ft wide.

Gloucester Road Primary School

Gloucester Road Primary School has embarked on a journey in developing 21st Century learning. The DEEP Curriculum focuses on REAL Projects allowing the development of SOLE to research our big questions.

Javier Bronchalo

Organisation: SOLE Spain

Javier Bronchalo is Project Coordinator at Knowledge Constructors and SOLE Spain. He is passionate about education with more than 18 years experience. He is enthusiastic about the idea of the learner as a social constructor of knowledge: the idea that learners achieve more through the active acquisition of information in groups,

Joe Jamison

Organisation: Pencils of Promise

Joe is the Pedagogy Innovation Specialist at Pencils of Promise, an innovative “for purpose” nonprofit organisation providing quality education in the developing world. He has over 16 years of experience in education,

Kajal Gupta

Khud

Khud uses self-organised learning techniques pioneered by TED Prize winner Sugata Mitra to impact the lives of marginalised children in Pakistan. Our goal is to build an EdTech platform to overcome the challenge of teacher quality and availability (1.25 million teachers are needed in Pakistan).

Madhura Rajvanshi

Mariano Lopata

Organisation: SOLE Argentina

Mariano is a psychologist and scientific research methodology specialist. He is also a university teacher and SOLE practitioner and researcher. As a founding member of SOLE Argentina he has participated,

Martlesham Primary Academy

Martlesham Primary Academy are a collaborative learning school that believes in challenging the status quo every day. As Sugata Mitra postulated… ‘What is the future of learning?’ Martlesham believe that SOLE is the key to unlocking the 21st Century learning skills young individuals require today and therein the future.

Milan Mandal

Natalia Arredondo

Natalia Arredondo

Organisation: SOLE NYC

Natalia Arredondo is currently undertaking her PhD studies in SOLE. While collecting data for her project, Natalia opened the first SOLE laboratory in America. She is currently the coordinator of SOLE NYC in Harlem,

Nic Arb

Oscar O'Farrill

Organisation: SOLE México

Oscar is a psychologist who has been experimenting with SOLE since 2013. Initially based in a community centre in Tres Marías, Morelos, SOLE has also been implemented by Oscar in different scenarios such as public and private schools for elementary and secondary students,

Paradise School Goa

Paradise School is about giving children the skills for 21st century living, and its director maps the curriculum to the IGCSE curriculum (they will also be aiming for International Cambridge Board accreditation).

Project Hello World

Project Hello World, created by non-profit organisation Projects For All, is based on the belief that vulnerable communities across the world deserve connectivity, access to information and opportunities to learn.

Rick Pasin

Organisation: My Education Room

Having spent over eighteen years as an instructor, department head and director of operations and academics in post-secondary institutions Rick saw first-hand the powerful influence of self-organized/flipped classroom learning environments.

Ritu Sehji

Organisation: Westlake Boys High School

Ritu is currently the Head of Food Technology at Westlake Boys High School. She is an author, a recipient of the Endeavour Teacher Fellowship award managed by Royal Society of New Zealand and has recently finished study at The MindLab following a Next Generation scholarship she received in 2015.

Salahuddin Khawaja

Sanjay Fernandes

Organisation: SOLE Colombia

Sanjay is the Director of SOLE Colombia. He is an economist, interaction designer, educator and electronic musician. He majored in economics with a minor in arts at the Andes University to later become an art professor in the Education Master’s program of the same university.

Sebastián Cuervo

Organisation: SOLE Colombia

Sebastián describes himself as an Internet Sociotechnologist. He is an Earlham College Human Development and Social Relations scholar, currently working as a digital culture and community maker consultant.

Shurashree Das

SOLE Argentina

SOLE Argentina aims to promote the SOLE methodology so that it becomes a well-known pedagogical theory which is shared, implemented and experienced by Argentine teachers on a regular basis. We aim to promote and advance 21st Century skills amongst primary and secondary students and teachers and enable them to fully participate and succeed in an interconnected global society.

SOLE Australia Network

SOLE Australia Network is a group of schools who are interested in developing SOLE as a mainstream classroom teaching strategy. The SOLE Australia Network is led by Paul Kenna, Principal of Belle Vue Park Primary School and Brett Millott,

SOLE Cleveland

SOLE Colombia

SOLE Colombia believes that when collaborating in groups, anybody can learn anything. Within groups, people can work to solve their own challenges and transform their community through self-organisation. SOLE Colombia has reached 14 provinces in Colombia,

SOLE for Georgia Homeschoolers

SOLE for Georgia Homeschoolers is currently running SOLEs at Learning for Life homeschool co-op located in Kennesaw, Georgia (a suburb of Atlanta). Previously, they were offering SOLE classes at The Learning Village (formerly known as Georgia Enrichment Program for Homeschoolers).

SOLE Greece

SOLE Greece was established in response to the needs of refugee children stranded in Greece. Over 20,000 children and their families are seeking refuge in Europe and elsewhere after been displaced as a result of conflicts in the Middle East.

SOLE Jamaica

SOLE Jamaica, a project run by the Kingston, Jamaica-based Literary Genius Foundation, is creating better early childhood education programs in Jamaica’s underserved communities. We aim to help young learners develop the foundational skills needed for a lifelong love of learning.

SOLE Mexico

SOLE México is a community focused on promoting SOLE with Mexican teachers, schools and education enthusiasts. Our goal is to expand the notion of Self Organised Learning Environments and Minimally Invasive Education through a nonprofit organisation and a social startup in order to have a social-economic approach to education in our country.

SOLE NYC

John B. Russwurm P.S. 197M is the proud host of the first SOLE lab in America. Located in Harlem, New York City, we inspire students to ask and solve Big Questions while teaching each other the intricate paths of knowledge.

SOLE South Africa

SOLE Spain

SOLE Spain’s goal is to bring the country’s teacher-training universities and schools together, to empower students to take control of their own learning. In an effort to scale the SOLE methodology across Spain in the next 5 years,

SOLE UK

SOLE UK is a forum for teachers across the UK to post the different SOLE questions they have asked their classes and to share their findings. This is a great place to celebrate all things SOLE and to encourage other schools to have a go at using Professor Mitra’s inspirational SOLE approach.

SOLE-Japan

SOLE-Japan started in Kani, Japan in 2016. It’s a privately run school currently operating on weekends when students have time to come. The students are mostly High School age. Parents and guest teachers are encouraged to attend these sessions too;

Tempo Foundation

Tempo Foundation aims at inspiring, encouraging and developing innovations in Bulgarian education. Implementing SOLE in Bulgarian schools is an excellent example of how innovative educational methods can work even in public school system in Bulgaria.

The Blog

Sugata Mitra, founder of School in the Cloud, posed an intriguing question on You Tube: How do we remember and why do we forget? His question was more than just a question. It was a Big Question, and it kicked off Skype in the Classroom’s Big Question Challenge in 2015 — an opportunity for select educators around the world to submit their own Big Question videos which students then answered by forming SOLEs.

Rebekah Davis, a teacher in North Carolina, says her students used self-organized learning to answer Sugata’s Big Question and “surprised themselves with how much they were able to learn in such a short amount of time.”

Sugata Mitra, founder of School in the Cloud, posed an intriguing question on You Tube: How do we remember and why do we forget? His question was more than just a question. It was a Big Question, and it kicked off Skype in the Classroom’s Big Question Challenge in 2015 — an opportunity for select educators around the world to submit their own Big Question videos which students then answered by forming SOLEs.

Rebekah Davis, a teacher in North Carolina, says her students used self-organized learning to answer Sugata’s Big Question and “surprised themselves with how much they were able to learn in such a short amount of time.” Here’s some of their results:

Elisa Farrell, a third grade teacher outside of Dallas, Texas says her students used SOLEs to answer Sugata’s question as well. “We’ve had research lessons before,” she says, “but seeing their approach to this question (being deliberately hands-off!) was a good eye-opener on future topics to cover.”

Some of those future topics Elisa mentions could be created by you, or your students!

“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has” – Margaret Mead, Cultural Anthropologist

Magna Rautenbach was ready to ‘semi retire’ with her husband to their tranquil country retreat – but then she discovered SOLE and everything changed.

After a rich and rewarding career, she had moved to a game farm near Pretoria, South Africa’s capital, in a region called the Magaliesberg Biosphere.*

And it was in this unlikely location that she discovered SOLE and made the connection with what she’d wanted to achieve in the business world for so long.

Frustrated by the “too little, too late” approach to training management-level employees in sustainability, Magna realised SOLE could get the message across where it can make a real difference – at school.

The success of SOLE globally appealed to Magna and she immediately saw the possibilities for South Africa. She particularly liked that SOLE is both transformative and supportive of the current curriculum, knowing that education reform has a track record of stalling when attempts are made to change it.

She launched SOLE South Africa in April 2017 with little more than an idea, a website and a ‘moonshot mission’ to help create 2,030 future-ready leaders, entrepreneurs and change-makers by 2030.

The biggest challenge is taking SOLE into underserved schools. There are a total of 25,574 schools in South Africa, with only 4,639 of those really well-established with computers and Internet connectivity. The majority, largely in rural, underserved areas, do not have any technology; some do not even have electricity.

TED Lab - Korakati

Korakati is well off any popular tourist trail: to get there you have to spend many hours on the road, take a boat up the Ganges and finally, a very bumpy van rickshaw up a dusty track passing huts, chickens and children along the way.

There’s an ‘other worldly’ feel about the place, which adds to its remoteness and is one of the reasons Sugata Mitra chose it for one of the TED Prize research labs. He knew just how hard it would be to create, but also just how much untapped potential there was here.

One person who probably questioned Sugata’s sanity on more than one occasion was project manager Ashis Biswas,

Korakati is well off any popular tourist trail: to get there you have to spend many hours on the road, take a boat up the Ganges and finally, a very bumpy van rickshaw up a dusty track passing huts, chickens and children along the way.

There’s an ‘other worldly’ feel about the place, which adds to its remoteness and is one of the reasons Sugata Mitra chose it for one of the TED Prize research labs. He knew just how hard it would be to create, but also just how much untapped potential there was here.

One person who probably questioned Sugata’s sanity on more than one occasion was project manager Ashis Biswas, whose job it was to sort out the logistics involved in constructing the building and getting it up and running. For example, when you look at the glass sides of the lab and then back at the only track they could have come along, it’s nothing short of a miracle that they got here in one piece!

The children at Korakati use the Internet to learn many things: for example, we were presented with beautiful handmade paper boxes topped with a rose when we arrived last month and inside were an origami flower and a jumping frog! The children had taught themselves how to make them using YouTube, with a little help from granny Jackie Barrow.

Natural challenges

There are, however, times when nature gets the better of this lab: the Internet connection, which is made possible thanks to a large bamboo pole erected on the roof, can be unreliable due to the distance from the hub, so a dongle has to be used instead, dangled from an open window. Water is also often scarce, and when there isn’t enough,

Paradise School Goa

A new venture in rural Goa aims to transform how India approaches mainstream education.

Paradise School Goa’s director, Shilpa Mehta, was born and raised in the UK, re-locating to Goa when her daughter was just two-years-old. When India-Fire was of school age, she decided to set up her own local primary school. Shilpa’s approach to education has been influenced by Maria Montessori’s teaching, which she became interested in before she moved to India.

Now her daughter has turned 12, she’s taking on another educational challenge: to set up Paradise School Goa – a secondary school in a 400-year-old mansion based purely on Professor Sugata Mitra’s SOLE (self-organised learning environment) principles.

A new venture in rural Goa aims to transform how India approaches mainstream education.

Paradise School Goa’s director, Shilpa Mehta, was born and raised in the UK, re-locating to Goa when her daughter was just two-years-old. When India-Fire was of school age, she decided to set up her own local primary school. Shilpa’s approach to education has been influenced by Maria Montessori’s teaching, which she became interested in before she moved to India.

Now her daughter has turned 12, she’s taking on another educational challenge: to set up Paradise School Goa – a secondary school in a 400-year-old mansion based purely on Professor Sugata Mitra’s SOLE (self-organised learning environment) principles.

The seed was sown for her latest venture while attending a conference in Jaipur as a Google Educator in 2015. She realised that schools could be communities of collaboration and support, not just places of mass instruction: this was the kind of school she wanted to set up.

When she discovered Professor Mitra’s TED talk shortly after, Shilpa felt it was ‘just like Montessori – but with computers’ and it spurned her on to create Paradise School Goa, with the aim of bringing SOLEs into mainstream education.

“SOLE is a very simple, but powerful idea,” she explains. “I just thought ‘this can really work – let’s go for it!’”

Shilpa met with Professor Mitra in the UK and told him her story. Inspired by his encouragement (he is an advisor to the school) and support from colleagues at SOLE Central in the UK, she is now a partner in Newcastle University’s dedicated SOLE research centre, helping to gather research data.

The school opened its doors in September, with the dedicated SOLE room officially opened by Sugata on 14th October 2016.

The Blog

We catch up with Liz Fewings, one of the members of the Granny Cloud Core Team, to talk about its origins and what the future holds.

Liz, a self-confessed ‘cloudaholic’, has been part of this project since 2009, when it first began. Like many others, she responded to an article in The Guardian newspaper in the UK which asked for retired teachers to volunteer an hour each week to talk with children in India.

“Back then we were a small band of English men and women, many of whom had never even heard of this strange thing called Skype,

We catch up with Liz Fewings, one of the members of the Granny Cloud Core Team, to talk about its origins and what the future holds.

Liz, a self-confessed ‘cloudaholic’, has been part of this project since 2009, when it first began. Like many others, she responded to an article in The Guardian newspaper in the UK which asked for retired teachers to volunteer an hour each week to talk with children in India.

“Back then we were a small band of English men and women, many of whom had never even heard of this strange thing called Skype, let alone actually used it,” says Liz. Following a long telephone conversation with Newcastle University, she then had to work out how to install Skype ahead of her first call to India.

“I was so anxious, waiting at home with a reassuring cup of tea within reach,” Liz admits. “And suddenly there was Suneeta (Kulkarni), in a hotel ‘somewhere in India’ with her own mug of tea and a beaming smile – and that was me hooked! Just two ladies chatting over a cup of tea which set the tone for the years to come.”

In those early days, communication was through email and a Wiki, which was rather formal and didn’t offer any real chance for the Grannies to get to know each other. However, following the first Granny Cloud conference in Newcastle, UK in 2010, friendships started to form and a Facebook group was set up shortly after, which remains an important and active community today. Prof Sugata Mitra’s TED Prize nomination was even made through this group!

“Facebook is where we support each other, share new ideas, get glimpses of the centres and keep up to date with what is happening,” says Liz.

SOLE Mexico

Since the last time I spoke to SOLE México’s co-ordinator Oscar O’Farrill several years ago a lot has happened.

To be honest, I’d be surprised if great things hadn’t been achieved in the interim as it was obvious from Oscar’s passion and drive in the previous blog, that SOLE México was destined to make big waves in education.

For one, they’ve trained over 160 teachers. “It’s been exploding like crazy – it’s been amazing,” says Oscar. “There are now 11 people in the team where before it was only me! We’re now working in several states in Mexico and I’ve been able to see how SOLE works in public schools,

Since the last time I spoke to SOLE México’s co-ordinator Oscar O’Farrill several years ago a lot has happened.

To be honest, I’d be surprised if great things hadn’t been achieved in the interim as it was obvious from Oscar’s passion and drive in the previous blog, that SOLE México was destined to make big waves in education.

For one, they’ve trained over 160 teachers. “It’s been exploding like crazy – it’s been amazing,” says Oscar. “There are now 11 people in the team where before it was only me! We’re now working in several states in Mexico and I’ve been able to see how SOLE works in public schools, elementary, high schools, teacher training – all over.”

SOLE México secured a state contract for training 100 teachers from extreme rural communities (including the middle of a jungle) and are now carrying out a follow-up programme where they visit each of the schools to help the teachers make SOLE an ongoing process.

Oscar says the importance of a follow-up to teacher training shouldn’t be under-estimated. “SOLE in theory is great, but to take it over a school cycle where many teachers want it focussed on their curriculum and expect regular evaluation, you have to design it around great Big Questions,” he explains.

“We’ve found that one session each week is not enough,” adds Oscar. “To me, SOLE is like Socratic Method 2.0 – basically going to the roots of the knowledge, sharing it and looking for it. Before they had only themselves and the teacher but now we have thousands of years of knowledge easily accessible through the Internet.”

From his experience, it can take several months to fully integrate SOLE as both students and teachers get used to a new way of learning.

The Blog

Imagine a tiny computer that contains a wealth of knowledge, as easy to use as your mobile phone – you’ve just visualised the next big thing in the tech world.

Like many great ideas, Endless was the result of taking time to mull over an issue. Its founder and CEO Matt Dalio was traveling in Pune, India, when he observed that smartphones and televisions were literally everywhere. This led him to realise that if you take a smartphone processor and make the television the monitor then you could build the world’s first truly affordable, high-quality PC.

He made the same observations while traveling through Latin America and Southeast Asia,

Imagine a tiny computer that contains a wealth of knowledge, as easy to use as your mobile phone – you’ve just visualised the next big thing in the tech world.

Like many great ideas, Endless was the result of taking time to mull over an issue. Its founder and CEO Matt Dalio was traveling in Pune, India, when he observed that smartphones and televisions were literally everywhere. This led him to realise that if you take a smartphone processor and make the television the monitor then you could build the world’s first truly affordable, high-quality PC.

He made the same observations while traveling through Latin America and Southeast Asia, but over time he realized that reducing the price of computers might not be enough. There are 2.5 billion people in the world who have access to computers, leaving 5 billion who do not and for over half of them, it’s not because they can’t afford it. Computers are expensive, but this isn’t the most important issue – in most locations people could get loans to pay for it and the cheapest laptop is now around $350.

Alejandro Farfán, General Manager for Endless Central America & Caribbean, takes up the story, explaining the three main barriers to emerging markets embracing computers. “Phones are intuitive and easy to use, where computers are not – for example, we had people saying to us ‘why do I need to double click on a computer when I can just do one click on my phone?’

“There was also a real fear of breaking it (the computer) if they didn’t know how to use it and so they weren’t prepared to make such a big investment just in case. And if you don’t have access to the Internet,